No matter how good a sales person you may be, there are times when sales calls just don’t go well. These poor sales calls can ruin your mood and perhaps, the rest of your day. Facing the aftermath of a poor sales call can really wreak havoc on your confidence or even your performance. It’s important to be able to recover quickly and effectively from a bad sales call so that a sales person can retain customers, learn lessons or move on to the next customer with confidence intact.

A few common challenges that tend to ruin a call are:

• A grumpy or angry prospect
• An unprepared sales person
• The sales person is having a bad day, and he or she lets it affect the call
• Stammering or stumbling over the sales presentation
• The sales person comes across too pushy in making a sale

A bad sales call can ruin your day if you don’t handle it right. But if you do, not only you would recover from it; you will also become a stronger and a better person.

Here are a few simple suggestions to help you to recover from a bad sales call:

Recover your mood and take a break

After a bad sales call, you need a short break to charge yourself with positive energy and return to a neutral state. If you keep on thinking about that bad sales call and torturing yourself, you are bound to ruin the rest of your calls for the day. Give yourself a few minutes to regain your focus and calm your nerves.

Take a break. Get your mind off the last call. Get some coffee, try listening to your favourite song, read inspirational quotes, read some jokes on Whats App, watch a funny video on You Tube or whatever you think that could help. The idea is to separate yourself from any lingering emotions from your bad sales call into the next one.    

Start fresh with your next call and avoid carrying the negativity over

Face your next call with a positive mind-set; visualize your next call with the positive outcome you expect. Don’t allow pessimism to set in. Remember that every new call means a new opportunity. The result of one bad sales call does not decide your destiny. And most important; never lose confidence in yourself or your product/service.

Learn from your experiences; ask yourself why the call turned bad

Recalling a bad experience and learning from your mistake can be a good lesson so that you’ll be able to avoid it in future calls.

Try to recall if you actually made a mistake by answering the following questions:

• Was your performance poor?
• Were you not focussed?
• Were you underprepared?
• What could you have said in a better way?
• How can you deal with the same situation next time it happens?
• How can you control bad feelings and emotions to avoid affecting the conversation?

Don’t take it personally

Next time you deal with a bad sales call; don’t let it drag you down. Do the opposite: turn it into an opportunity to become better sales professional. Remember that the show must go on. Bad things are bound to happen and professionals don’t let it affect their performance for too long. Bounce back by using these tips and get ready for your next opportunity to close a deal.

How do you get back in the game after a bad sales call? Let us know in the comments below.

Do not forget to hit the like and share button if you found this blog useful.  

All sales coaches would have trained you on questions you should be asking during a sales presentation. I would talk today on questions you should never be asking. There are a lot of questions being asked that are simply stupid. They are actually hurting salespeople in the sales process and the prospects automatically turn off as soon as they hear these questions.

Let us talk about these 10 worst questions and ensure that you never ask them again.

“How are you?”

This is commonly used as a conversation starter in 95% of selling situations reflexively and it’s killing them. The prospect knows that you don’t really care how they’re doing. Most sales people are starting calls, meetings and even emails with this stupid question. Just stop ever asking anyone that question. Come out with something more creative. As a way to start a conversation you may ask-“Did I catch you in the middle of something?” This will actually catch them off-guard and will be more likely to actually get engagement.

“How can I help you?”

No one wants to be sold. The prospect immediately feels like they’re being cornered and being pushed into making a close. They go defensive and go into a shell.

Instead you may ask-“can I provide you information? May be I can ask some questions to help understand your needs and provide you with information to help you move along.”

“Do you have a minute?”

All of us know nothing could be sold in a minute. What it conveys to the prospect is that your time is not valuable. It only shows that you are lying and you lose all credibility.    

You may instead ask-“Is this a good time to talk?”

“Can I set up a call so I can learn more about your challenges?”

This is one of the worst questions to ask as it shows absolutely zero value on the sales person’s part. Show some value through the quality of your questions. Then just set the logical next step to go deeper.

“Would you be interested if……?”

Whatever you fill in the blank, there is going to be a stupid question. Your objective during a sales call is not only to get the customer interested but also to uncover their challenges. You should be asking questions to identify the challenges that matter and then solving them.

“Are you the decision maker?”

This is way too direct and will never get the information you really need. Asking this stupid question will get you either false information or offending and pissing off your prospect. Instead, learn about their decision making process by focussing on the process. So, when you talk to them regarding their decision making process, they will actually tell you who are involved in their decision and how do they go about making a decision.

“What can I tell you right away that would make you buy?”

This question is a high pressure and so transparent that it tells your prospect you are there to just sell him your product and you have no intent to help him satisfy his actual need.

“How could you not want this deal?”

You cannot push. You cannot shovel down your product in your prospect’s throat. Instead, make the prospect realize that your product will actually help them or take their business to the next level.

“Would you like some time to think about it?”

Delay kills sales. Lead the prospect towards a buying decision and close the sales then and there.

“Would you like a proposal or a quote?”

Close the sale without a quote. Get a commitment after you have properly qualified a prospect, take out the agreement and sign the deal.

Stop asking these stupid questions during a sales presentation. Instead, help the prospect uncover challenges, show how your offerings will actually solve them and then set clear next steps.

During a sales conversation, ask

• Intelligent questions,
• Smart questions
• Leading questions
• The discovery questions
• The multiple choice questions
• The redirect questions

Closing is nothing more than asking the right prospect the right questions at the right time.

You have all seen big budget mega movies with leading actors and expensive sets bomb at the box office. They fall flat on their face as they do not have a story line to support their presentation.

A sales presentation may face the same fate. A formal sales presentation must get attention of the prospect and make him interested in the product. The sales person can do it through a lively and interesting sales talk as well as a systematic demonstration of the product. The product could be offered to feel, taste or smell depending on the nature of the product.

It is important to know about the presentation process and how to be more persuasive and how to put a structure together for a good presentation.

It’s always good to have a great opening to your presentation.  Talking too much and not asking enough questions may confuse the customer. If it’s too many statements without questions, you’re not a good presenter. A good presenter is somebody that’s asking relevant questions because you get to find about the customer and his buying needs. Providing some insight or some information that the customer may not know as an attention grabber may be a powerful opening.

Another aspect of a great presentation is that you must have a narrative or a story line–

• What is your presentation about?
• What’s the key point you are about to make?

It may be a new technology that may be your cutting edge or you may be trying to convince the customer that he needs to replace the product or company he is using at present with yours as you are better.

Having a nice and crisp narrative supported by two or three key messages makes the presentation that much powerful. Produce authentic evidences to prove the product’s superiority.

Every time a presentation is made, it always begins with the obvious end in mind. What is the end? What do you want to happen when your presentation is done? You need to have this clearly defined in your thoughts even before you put together your presentation. The desired outcome must be clearly defined before making the presentation. It helps you build your presentation towards the pre defined desired outcome.

Address any concerns or objections the prospect may have. A good sales person must interpret objections clearly and remove them tactfully. Unless the objections and complaints are satisfactorily answered, the sales cannot take place.

Last but not the least; the presentation must have an outcome. So, as you move towards the close, you must start asking for commitments.

Qualities of a good presentation:

• Presentation is questions and knowing your craft, knowing your product and generally not B sing people whom you don’t know what you are talking about.
• Sales Presentation must be complete covering all aspects related to company, product, competitive benefits, etc.
• Sales Presentation must be clear, free from all confusions and vagueness.
• Sales Presentation must be consistent.
• Sales Presentation must be precise.
• Sales Presentation must prove superiority of products over competition.
• Sales Presentation must be confidence winning.
• Sales Presentation must be supported with evidences. A good sales person must produce testimonials, awards and guarantees issued by government or test labs, celebrities, and other reliable sources.

The Sales Presentation Process may be summarised

• Start with a structure
• Start with a good opening with some attention grabbers/did you know information/some key insights/ information beyond the obvious
• Create a narrative or a storyline
• Support your narrative with demonstration/social proofs/things you have done with other customers
• Reduce resistance by effectively handling objections
• Close by asking commitment questions.

During your presentation, you have to answer three key questions which the customer always has in mind:

Why do I need to change?

Why should I do it now?

Why should I buy From you?
 

• What would you do?
• What would you say?
• What would you show?
• What would you demonstrate to answer the above three key questions?

If you can answer these three key questions, a customer is more likely to say “YES” than a “NO” to your sales presentation.

Be well prepared- Prepare, prepare, practice, practice and then practice more for an effective presentation. You only have one shot at making a first impression.

“If you do not prepare or plan to succeed, you are planning to fail.”

Athletes and sports teams prepare before a game. Can you imagine a top sports team arriving to an important game without any preparation or practice? Can you imagine them not spending time studying strategies or tactics of the other team?

For sales professionals, the game is the sales call.

Why do we fail to pre-plan our sales call? There are varieties of reasons:

• We may know the customer well,
• We may feel confident that we can anticipate and respond to questions,
• We may be too busy to develop a sales plan and spend time preparing for the call and
• We may feel that we are skilled at improvising or winging it.

Researches reveal something interesting. Even if we are good at all of the above, we can still be more effective with a plan. With a plan, we can measure our improvisation skills for the circumstances that inevitably arise that we couldn’t anticipate or plan for.

HOW DO WE PLAN?

1. Prepare for your meeting- ensure you are well prepared with:

• Who will be there?
• What do I know about him?
• What is your objective?
• What is your alternative objective?
• What is your last alternative?
• What questions might I get? – anticipate questions
• What objections or stalls?

There are two parts to preparation-

2. Ensure you have all the required materials- sales tools/aids etc.
3. Arrange: Yourself, Bag, Interview
4. Rehearse and visualize the Interview- its results and actions

WHAT YOU’VE JUST DONE?

• You’ve programmed your mental computer to direct you to your goal
• You’re preparing to Succeed.

TERRITORY PLANNING

• Where are my customers located?
• How can I best cover the territory?
• Where am I planning to meet my targets?
• Territory account inventory
• List of active and potential customers
• Divide customers into few larger zones to avoid fire fighting calls
• Plan loop journeys
• The first call should be farthest from the base and salesperson should work back towards his base.

The better prepared you are for your calls, the easier they will be. A little research, a known objective, some anticipation and visualisation, having your marketing materials ready and a planned territory will give you more confidence when you make calls and lead you to the road to success.

Do let me know what you picked and implemented from this blog, and how it impacted your sales calls. I look forward to know about your experience.

Do not forget to grab this Sales Call Planning Checklist I created Just For You.

If you’re a sales manager handling a great team, selling an awesome product and still not hitting the numbers; let me paint a picture. Your team is performing various activities each day, across accounts and deals. The only metric tracked is the number of closed deals and their value. There is no understanding of the number of activities performed by the salesperson on a daily basis. The revenue produced by the team is dipping, and no one has a clue as to why.

Does this sound familiar? If yes, the team needs a sales process, and not just any sales process . but the one customised to their needs, the product and the market..

It is hard to analyse team performance if there are no activity metrics available. If you wish to understand how to take a deal forward, there has to be a set process which explains each stage of the process. Each salesperson should be accountable for sticking to the process and guiding the customer through a sale. With a process in place, it is easier to analyse bottlenecks and understand how each bottleneck could be tackled.

 A systematic selling process consists of following ten steps as shown in the diagram:

1. PRE-SALES PREPARATION:

Pre-Sales is the first step of getting prepared to serve customers. A good salesperson must be well prepared to treat the customer effectively. He must be aware of the customer’s buying motives and buying behavior. We have in our earlier blogs already covered that the following essentials of selling must be fully known to him-

2. PROSPECTING:

Prospecting means finding or locating potential customers. It is a process of differentiating prospects and suspects. A prospect is a potential buyer with unmet needs, ability to pay and willingness to buy. It is much easier to prospect for the right customer if you have a marketing plan that determines your target market.

There are three different segments of people in the world of prospecting-

One must qualify the prospect in terms of needs,   purchasing power and motivation to buy.

3. PRE-APPROACH:

Once prospecting has been done, the sales person has to gather complete details about the prospect. These details are necessary to prepare his sales presentation. These would include information on prospect’s nature, needs, problems, personal habits, preferences, etc.

 4. APPROACH & CONTACT:

Now that the sales person is prepared with his pre-approach, he has to seek advance appointment for the personal meeting. The approach could be different on case to case basis. Having a script for an approach call is a MUST. He must not directly jump to sales talk in the approach call. He must be able to attract the prospect’s attention and get him interested in the product.

5. PRESENTATION:

A formal sales presentation must get attention of the prospect and make him interested in the product. The sales person can do it through a lively and interesting sales talk as well as a systematic demonstration of the product. The product could be offered to feel, taste or smell depending on the nature of the product.

Leaks in your presentation– Talking too much and not asking enough questions. If it’s too many statements without questions, you’re not a good presenter. A good presenter is somebody that’s asking relevant questions because you get to find about the customer and his buying needs.

He can produce authentic evidences to prove the product’s superiority. All queries must also be adequately solved.

Qualities of a good presentation:

• Presentation is questions and knowing your craft, knowing your product and generally not B sing people whom you don’t know what you are talking about.
• Sales Presentation must be complete covering all aspects related to company, product, competitive benefits, etc.
• Sales Presentation must be clear, free from all confusions and vagueness.
• Sales Presentation must be consistent.
• Sales Presentation must be precise.
• Sales Presentation must prove superiority of products over competition.
• Sales Presentation must be confidence winning.
• Sales Presentation must be supported with evidences. A good sales person must produce testimonials, awards and guarantees issued by government or test labs, celebrities, and other reliable sources.

Be well prepared– Prepare, prepare, practice, practice and then practice more for an effective presentation. You only have one shot at making a first impression.

6. HANDLING OBJECTIONS & COMPLAINTS:

Address any concerns or objections the prospect may have. Again be prepared- Objection Handling is a step by step process that we shall take up separately in one of my future blog. A sales person, however, must always welcome objections as it shows that customer is interested in the products and is more likely to place an order.

A good sales person must interpret objections clearly and remove them tactfully. Unless the objections and complaints are satisfactorily answered, the sales cannot take place. Prospects must be convinced about benefits, superior performance and strong aspects of the products. A great deal of expertise, experience, skills, patience and practice are important to handle objections successfully.  

7. CLOSING SALES:

Closing of sales is the climax or the desired outcome of the entire sales process. Sales Process must end by getting orders. A successful sales person MUST close the sale. He should not wait for the customer to ask for the product-that will never come. He has to “ASK” for the order. A good sales person must summarize what the customer has purchased and agree the deal.

8. FOLLOW UP:

Follow up is a simple two-step process- 

• Completion of selling formalities
• Taking other post-sales actions.

A salesperson writes order, arranges for dispatch and delivery of the product and decides on the mode of payment. Billing and guarantee cards are issued.  Follow up is 100% discipline-Details are equally important. Details are important as, if you don’t remember the conversation you had with the customer in the first meeting, reflects you do not pay attention to things. But if you do have the discipline to follow up and you do remember the specific details you had with the customer in the first meeting, reflects you value his time.

9. REFERRAL:

Once you have closed sales- do not celebrate. Ask for referrals. Preparing a script for asking for referrals is also important. Asking for referral is setting yourself up for growing your business.

10. MAINTAIN CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP:

Sales person-customer relationship does not end with one transaction, but is the beginning of a long term relationship. Customers repeat orders only if they are satisfied with products and post-sales services. A great sales person must remain in live contact with the customer for future business.

Studies have proved that if you sell out of sequence, you kill the sale. There is a logical buying process that a customer goes through. You have to get your selling process in line fitting the buying process and the sale is bound to happen.